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Ten “Rs” of Social Reaction: Using Social Media to Analyse the “Post-Event” Impacts of the Murder of Lee Rigby Terrorism and Political Violence ISSN: 0954-6553 (Print) 1556-1836 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ftpv20 Ten “Rs” of social reaction: Using social media to analyse the “post-event” impacts of the murder of Lee Rigby Martin Innes, Colin Roberts, Alun Preece & David Rogers To cite this article: Martin Innes, Colin Roberts, Alun Preece & David Rogers (2016): Ten “Rs” of social reaction: Using social media to analyse the “post-event” impacts of the murder of Lee Rigby, Terrorism and Political Violence, DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2016.1180289 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2016.1180289 Published with license by Taylor & Francis© 2016 Martin Innes, Colin Roberts, Alun Preece, and David Rogers. Published online: 07 Jul 2016. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 101 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ftpv20 Download by: [Cardiff University Libraries] Date: 13 July 2016, At: 03:17 TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2016.1180289 Ten “Rs” of social reaction: Using social media to analyse the “post-event” impacts of the murder of Lee Rigby Martin Innes, Colin Roberts, Alun Preece, and David Rogers Cardiff University Crime and Security Research Institute, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK ABSTRACT KEYWORDS This article provides a case study analysis of social reactions to the Conflict dynamics; counter- murder of Fusilier Lee Rigby in 2013. Informed by empirical data col- terrorism; Lee Rigby; social lected by systematic monitoring of social media platforms, the analysis media; social reactions identifies a number of online behaviours with offline effects—labeled the ten “Rs”—that collectively constitute the process of social reaction to the crime. These are defined as: reporting; requesting; responding; recruiting; “risking”; retaliating; rumouring; remembering; reheating; and “resiliencing”. It is argued that the ability to observe these beha- viours through the application of qualitative social media analysis has considerable potential. Conceptually, the analysis provides new insight into the complex and chaotic processes of sense-making and meaning attribution that arise in the aftermath of terrorist attacks. It illuminates how patterns of social reaction on social media are nuanced and com- plicated, with different segments of the public interpreting the same developments very differently. In addition, the findings and the concep- tual framework outlined have implications for policy and practice devel- opment in terms of establishing a more effective and evidence-based approach to the consequence management of “post-event” conflict dynamics and social reactions. Speaking shortly after the terrorist attacks in Paris upon the staff of Charlie Hebdo magazine in January 2015, the Director General of the UK Security Service cautioned that future successful attacks on British soil were almost inevitable.1 It was, he elaborated, impossible for the police and security agencies to prevent all of the plots and attempts Downloaded by [Cardiff University Libraries] at 03:17 13 July 2016 being brought forward. As well as delineating an ongoing sense of threat stretching into the future, these remarks also implicitly and intriguingly highlight a neglected issue in the terrorism studies literature. Over the past decade there has been a significant increase in the quantity of research on nearly all facets of terrorism, emanating from a diverse range of disciplines. The vast majority of these studies have, in different ways, focused upon issues of prediction, pre- emption, and prevention, especially with respect to individuals and groups thought likely to engage in terrorist activities.2 However, far less is known about what happens in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and how processes of social reaction unfold and develop. If, as the Director General suggests, future attacks are almost inevitable, this begins to look CONTACT Martin Innes InnesM@cardiff.ac.uk Cardiff University Crime and Security Research Institute, School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Avenue, Cardiff CF10 3WT, Wales, UK. Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/ftpv. © 2016 Martin Innes, Colin Roberts, Alun Preece, and David Rogers. Published with license by Taylor & Francis This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 2 M. INNES ET AL. like a significant gap in our knowledge. For if you cannot prevent such incidents happening, there would seem to be considerable public value in understanding what happens following attacks of this kind, in order to leverage more effective management of their community impacts and consequences. It is with this issue that the current article engages. Informed by empirical data collected in the days, weeks, and months following the killing of Fusilier Lee Rigby in London in 2013, it sets out an account of how processes of social reaction emerge, evolve, and adapt. These data were collected by monitoring social media from the first tweet from an eyewitness at the scene of the attempted beheading on the street in Woolwich, through to the conclusion of the court case. The dataset collected thus spans 35 million data points, cast as digital traces of social action and emotions, to provide a high-resolution picture of what happened following this particularly heinous killing. The point being that, certainly compared with more orthodox research methods that can be applied to study processes of social reaction to defined events, collecting and analysing social media affords a higher resolution and more agile way of tracking and tracing how processes of social reaction develop and evolve over time. There have been several investigations of the Rigby case, including the application of social media analytics. Understandably the most detailed commentary upon the case relates to the enquiry conducted by the House of Commons Intelligence Select Committee, which had a particular focus upon the extent of the opportunities that police and the Security Service had to detect and interdict the two suspects.3 A rapid content analysis of 20,000 Twitter messages to the Metropolitan Police Service in the wake of the Rigby murder was undertaken by researchers at the think-tank Demos to ground an argument that police organisations need to develop a “SOCMINT” (social media intelli- gence) capability.4 Quantitative analysis also underpins the approach of Burnap et al. and Williams and Burnap5 and their focus upon modeling the propagation of “cyber-hate” by co-opting aspects of Cohen’s6 phases of moral panic. McEnery et al.7 provide an alter- native, more qualitatively-inspired, methodological take on the issues, finding that main- stream media accounts play an important role in steering and guiding the social media conversation (but the reverse is less true). The latter point was harnessed in support of the present work. Compared with these previous studies though, the approach reported herein represents the most thorough and rigorous analysis of the Rigby case conducted to date. The raw volume of data collected, in conjunction with the duration over which it was gathered, Downloaded by [Cardiff University Libraries] at 03:17 13 July 2016 afford unrivalled opportunities to understand how processes of social reaction, enabled by social media communications, unfold and develop. The application of qualitative analytic approaches to studying the whole of the case, from crime scene to court, enables the article to identify a number of hitherto neglected aspects. This in turn affords a number of new theoretical insights and innovations in the form of ten distinct behaviours that collectively configure the overarching process of social reaction that occurred in the aftermath of the Rigby case. Documenting and describing these constitutes the main body of the article. Prior to this though, a more detailed account of the research design and methodology is provided. This includes mapping the contours of the dataset. The conclusion returns to the policy and practice implications of generating new insights into processes of post- event reaction. In addition, we also seek to develop a more conceptual account of why the neglect of these issues represents a significant oversight. TERRORISM AND POLITICAL VIOLENCE 3 Research design and method At around 14:20 on May 22, 2013, a member of the public made an emergency call to the Metropolitan Police reporting an unfolding incident in Woolwich, London. Within 14 minutes armed officers were at the scene where they shot and apprehended two armed suspects. Lying dead in the road was the body of Fusilier Lee Rigby, whom the two suspects had attempted to behead in what was later identified as an Islamist extremist terrorist attack. In response to the attack the English Defence League (a Far-Right political group) mobilized to engage in violent public disorder that night, throwing bottles and stones at the police. Following this, for a number of weeks afterwards, mosques were attacked and those perceived to be Muslim received insults and were subject to physical attack in the street, including an arson attack on the Al-Rahma Islamic Centre in Muswell Hill, London. In June and July in Walsall, Wolverhampton, and Tipton, a series of explosive devices were detonated outside mosques—the Tipton device being packed with nails. Pavlo Lapshyn, a White Supremacist Ukrainian student, was later charged and convicted of those offences, and with stabbing to death an elderly Muslim man in Birmingham near the Green Lane Mosque. From the initial incident, right through to the conclusion of the sentencing of the two killers ten months after the initial attack, details about all of these events were being communicated via social media platforms.
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